Communicative Resilience in Virtual Worlds: Responding to Marginalisation Through Counter-Narratives

Abstract

In contemporary society, marginalized communities are increasingly utilizing video games as decentralized spaces where counter-narratives are constructed against dominant disinformation flows. Despite of the increasing emergence of these practices, academic inquiries remain relatively limited. Given this academic deficiency, we compared the institutional framings with communicative practices of game players about the Black Lives Matter protests in Animal Crossing: New Horizons and the Civil Rights Movement in Fortnite. To enhance the effectiveness of the analysis and the depth of the interpretation, this study adopts methodological triangulation. The approach incorporates LDA thematic model analysis, NVivo-based content coding and ELAN multimodal analysis. Our findings indicate that through semantic fragmentation and affective domestication, institutional discourse reframes the public subversions. This transformation thus reduces political urgency into symbolic commemoration. Relatively, marginalized players build a counter-narrative structure by using the game affordances, spatial symbolism and collective rituals of the game mechanism. They redefine citizen participation as an evolving negotiate process that actively challenges the dominant narrative boundaries. These practices expand the theory of communication resilience proposed by Buzzanell (2010), revealing that resilience is reflected through both daily adaptive interactions and multimodal strategic interventions. Finally, this study emphasizes the potential of digital games as a space for intellectual struggles. In this context, marginalized communities use symbolic powers in a creative way, they challenge the information exclusion mechanisms and reshape citizens' memory while negotiating social and political visibility.